A rather useless browser plugin that can change the shape of the cursor when the mosue pointer is over the page. The reason it's useless is that it's either a cheap gimmick that wastes prosessor power, RAM, drive space, and network bandwidth or yet another advertisement. Fun. And, as usual, it only works in Windos (win32 specifically).

In the past, there have been serious privacy concerns over their use of information collected, since every cursor change is reported back to them along with a GUID. Their privacy policy claims they don't do anything with all this, but...

If you really want to check them out, http://www.cometsystems.com

This node created because Marshall Applewhite told me to node about comets.

Comet cursor keeps track of which websites your browser goes to. This is an indisputable fact. Comet Systems, Inc. never warns you about this when you install Comet Cursor. They never do anything to indicate that it does anything but "enhance" your web-browsing experience. If you go to their page to find out more about their collection of information, they have no formal privacy policy, and they have some stuff whining about how the big bad media treated them unfairly. They never explicitly say what is being tracked, they never say why it's tracked, they never say what it's used for, and even more importantly:

They never say why they have the right to spy on people!

Even if they seem benign, and even if it is totally anonymous (which it can't be, because they use a GUID mechanism, and so all web-browsing is still lumped together as the same person, whether or not they know the name of that person), what gives them the right to use your habits as their data?

When you sign up to be a Nielsen family, you are doing it voluntarily. You are quite voluntarily telling the networks which shows you like and which ones you don't. You know what information they have, and you asked to have your opinions count. Nobody coerces you into becoming a Nielsen family, and if you do decide to be one, you know exactly what information they're keeping track of and why.

Comet Cursor has no right to track peoples' web browsing habits without explicitly getting full consent. And they don't even try to say, "Oh, yeah, we collect information," either. All they say is, basically, "Oh, well, any information we track is still completely anonymous."

I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, for the most part, but it's a rant I had to make after seeing a whole buttload of sites with Comet Cursor on it yesterday and constantly being told, "Come, on, click yes, it's only a 10-second download!" and then having to worry about whether I'm clicking on the right button or not. (This was at work in MSIE as an ActiveX popup. I couldn't just close it.)

Ugh.